Dear reader,

Soon, we at If I Can’t Dance will round up and retreat in restorative climes and configurations, and hope that also you, dear audiences, find yourselves in such circumstances or are about to. In our last letter we promised to get back to you before the summer break, offering a sneak-peak into our upcoming festival in Amsterdam this coming fall and winter. So here we are.

But before we share with you details on first-in-line events, we want to thank you for visiting us in the online If I Can’t Dance Studio. In the past months we have invited you week by week to pay a visit into the rooms of the Edition IX artists and researchers Susanne Altmann, Black Speaks Back, Samia Henni, Nuraini Juliastuti, Jessika Khazrik and Constantina Zavitsanos. We hope you have enjoyed navigating the questions, materials, sources, perspectives, techniques, and structures they have put in position for developing their commissions with If I Can’t Dance. We also asked for your attention to the work being done in our online studio by fellow Devika Chotoe, and Edition V researcher Grant Watson activating his How We Behave project. Most of these projects will continue to develop within this online register, so please feel welcome to (re)visit the If I Can’t Studio in the coming weeks and months for new uploads!

All these projects will have on-site presentations across Amsterdam venues from September onwards. Between November and February you can expect events with Susanne Altmann, Black Speaks, Nuraini Juliastuti and Jessika Khazrik. The first three events we invite you to mark in your calendars are:

— an online Radio Emma show with Devika Chotoe in conversation with Tina Campt and Rolando Vázquez Melken on 20 September;
— a series of three performances, titled Entrophy, by Constantina Zavitsanos in collaboration with Angelo Custodio & Pedro Matias, S*an D. Henry-Smith and Geo Wyex at Splendor on 30 September;
— and the opening of the exhibition, titled Performing Colonial Toxicity, by Samia Henni in collaboration with Framer Framed on 7 October.

Please keep an eye on our website and socials for side-events, and/or subscribe to our newsletter for updates.

While we hope your August will feel ‘endless’, we invite you back for some ‘punctuated’ moments in fall.

Frédérique Bergholtz,
with all of the If I Can’t Dance team